A while back Bill Nye got booed by some biblical fundamentalists when he mentioned that the moon reflects the light of the sun because those fundamentalists felt this was a grievous insult to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16: “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Accordingly, the moon must therefore emit rather than reflect light or else it would not conform to God’s design. This was small potatoes compared to a new movie that has Star Trek: Voyager actress Kate Mulgrew inadvertantly promoting geocentrism on behalf of the conservative Catholic extremist Robert Sungenis, a geocentrist best known for his controversial views on Judaism that are often described as anti-Semitic. Aw, heck: They are anti-Semitic, as we shall see. (Sungenis denies being anti-Semitic, arguing that he does not hate Jewish people, only the actions of Jews.) The film, called The Principle, is based on Sungenis’s blog Galileo Was Wrong, based in turn on his doctoral dissertation of the same name, written for his PhD in religious studies earned from a correspondence school in the Republic of Vanuatu. His work holds that the sun goes around a stationary earth.Mulgrew wrote on her Facebook page that she had been hired to narrate the trailer without knowing the content of the film or of Sungenis’s controversial views: “I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary.”

Sungenis believes that “science is not all it’s cracked up to be” and doesn’t think much of historiography either. In 2002 he denied that the Holocaust happened, though he later recanted this view. He also believes, according to a 2005 series of articles in The Remnant, that world Jewry is involved in a satanic conspiracy designed to place Lucifer on earth’s throne. More of his claims about the nefarious intent of Jews, and their connection to a global Illuminati conspiracy, can be found in his Catholic Apologetics International article “Neo-Cons and the Jewish Connection.” Sungenis describes the Jews as having abandoned the Law of Moses while living in Babylon in Late Antiquity and having everywhere and always fomented revolution against the authorities before turning to the satanic occult:

While in Europe the Jews became more prominent in society, especially in banking and other financial matters. At this time the religious Jews created the Kabbalah and the Zohar. Full of mysticism and the occult, they were the Jewish version of the Gnostic heresy of the first centuries AD. The Kabbalah taught that God is an unconscious being and unknowable by the world, but that he communicates with the Jews through levels of “sepharim.” It teaches that the Jews would one day rule the world, while the Zohar teaches that non-Jews do not have souls and therefore are not human; and that “redemption will not be complete until Amalek will be exterminated”

He identifies Amalek with Muslims, and seems oblivious to the fact that other religions’ mythologies also call for universal rule. The Christian myth of the Last World Emperor (from the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius) who will unite all the world in his Holy Roman Empire is just one such figure. But it gets worse from here. He describes communism as a Jewish philosophy, the Bolsheviks as primarily Jews, and world finance as being controlled by Jews sympathetic to communism. Bolshevik Jews, he wrote, “raped the woman and girls and sodomized the men and boys while other children were sacrificed – all perhaps part of a Kabbalistic/Illuminati ritual for world dominance.” He accuses Jewish historians of hiding these facts, as well as what he claimed was Hitler’s simple mimicry of Jewish-Soviet practices, particularly Jewish-run anti-Christian concentration camps in Russia: “these camps have been systematically destroyed and their existence denied by the Jewish controlled media in Russia and the United States.” Stalin, in his reading, was a hero for attempting to suppress the Jews, and he was murdered for his efforts. Needless to say, the Jews fled to America where they quickly became billionaires, financed the Democratic Party, and started movie studios and all three (!) major television networks to promote “anti-Christian morality,” particularly pornography and homosexuality, in order to destroy society “from the inside,” while glorifying Jewish suffering: “The ‘Holocaust’ is all we are allowed to see by the Jewish-controlled media.” Oh, and of course this is going to lead to nuclear war as all good-thinking Christians resist the evil Jewish agenda:

Let’s all hope and pray that the heightened conflict engendered by Jewish power does not someday result in an all-out nuclear free-for-all. Let’s hope by the grace of God that the winner-take-all philosophy now present in the Neo-con, Evangelical and Zionist agenda does not end up producing the worst carnage the world has ever known.

There is much in Sungenis’s worldview that clearly falls in the framework of a classic conspiracy theory, and its anti-Semitic trappings are if nothing else a classic callback to the millennia of anti-Semitic conspiracies. Especially egregious is his claim of the sacrifice of children for the Illuminati, recalling nothing so much as the ancient claim of blood-libel, which falsely held that the Jews used the blood of sacrificed Christian children to reenact Jesus’ persecution and death, a claim first seen in 1173 in Thomas of Monmouth’s hagiography of William of Norwich, a child allegedly tortured and killed by Jews in 1144. Thomas said that an international council of Jewry chose a country each year where a Christian child was to be slaughtered to preserve the Jewish race through magic:

As a proof of the truth and credibility of the matter we now adduce something which we have heard from the lips of Theobald, who was once a Jew, and afterwards a monk. He verily told us that in the ancient writings of his fathers it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland. Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ, that so they might avenge their sufferings on Him; inasmuch as it was because of Christ's death that they had been shut out from their own country, and were in exile as slaves in a foreign land. Wherefore the chief men and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together at Narbonne, where the Royal seed [resides], and where they are held in the highest estimation, and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit; and whatever country the lot falls upon, its metropolis has to carry out the same method with the other towns and cities, and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfill the duty imposed by authority. (Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich 11, trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James)

Sungenis has modernized the claim somewhat, but not significantly; it is of a piece with its medieval predecessor and is, in many ways, interchangeable with it. So on the one hand it’s amusing that a Star Trek actress is accidentally promoting geocentrism, but behind the neoconservative Catholic extremism of the film lies a more disturbing worldview, and I wonder if geocentrism is, like creationism, a wedge issue designed to bring new audiences to its proponent’s real agenda.

One of the people in the film, Lawrence Krauss, has said that he was not interviewed for the film; they are just using clips from other events. So there are atheist voices in there by the power of editing, it seems.

Reply

KIF

4/8/2014 06:55:09 am

Bad practice, using out-of-context archive footage

Scott Hamilton

4/8/2014 05:51:10 am

Like.. what? It's a documentary, and like a lot of documentaries, it's put together from interviews that may not have been given explicitly for that particular project. Lawrence Krauss has already said he can't even identify where the clips of him in the trailer come from, so it's not exactly a huge conspiracy or anything. People like him give lots of interviews, and sign releases that mean they can show up almost anywhere.

Also worth noting that Mugrew is also disowning her involvement with the doc, saying she didn't know that what she was narrating for was a geocentrism film. She recently noted this on Facebook.

lurkster

4/8/2014 04:55:33 am

Excellent article. But the phrase "Catholic fundamentalism" at the ending isn't really an accurate fit here. It's almost too kind, or giving him more credit than he deserves. Sungenis' positions fall under the category of Catholic orthodoxy extremism. It's NOT mainstream Catholicism, and it's not the old-fashioned version of mainstream Catholicism (fundamentalism). It's extremely archaic pre-Vatican I fundamentalism.

So a better (more accurate) label would be what modern-day Catholic scholars would critically refer to as "Neoconservative Catholic Orthodoxy."

Or alternatively, the politically correct (unoffensive) version would be what sedevacantists/anti-progressive Catholic adherents who would support this type of drek typically refer to themselves as "Traditionalists" so as to not be confused with Eastern Christian Orthodoxy (which is likewise too "progressive" for their liking).

Good call on opting to go with the neoconservative label. As a progressive pro-science/pro-evolution/pro-life Catholic, I often roll my eyes and begrudgingly ignore the typical Evangelical Christian fundamentalist rants championing right wing Creationism. I rationalize that position in terms of - at least their crusading for socially accepted norms from 50-60+ years ago.

Where as the "Catholic Traditionalists" who buy into the positions Sungenis supports cite church doctrine from the late 17th century as justification for their views! Thus, my comment that calling them fundamentalists was almost too kind. And FWIW, I'd rather break bread with a roomful of preachy fundamentalists rather than be stuck in an elevator for a few minutes with one Traditionalist on a tirade. They're that bad - no joke.

And back on point - Kate Mulgrew backpeddles with “I am not a geocentrist..."

Well we ALL KNOW how that originated - a mixture of embryonic Republicanism that ditched Monarchism in Europe throughout the 19th century and the fact that DAS KAPITAL was written by Karl Marx. Problem solved.

Reply

Mandalore

4/8/2014 05:09:01 am

Mulgrew seemed a bit of an odd duck when Shatner interviewed her for 'The Captains'. (I saw it on Netflix; totally by accident; I didn't even want to watch it; and I certainly didn't watch all of the episodes; Benjamin Sisko wasn't even a captain!) You would think that flying around in her spaceship would have given her better perspective on astronomy.

It is clear where most of Sungenis's crazed, fear-based ideas (as presented here) reside in one place: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which include numerous passages describing the surreptitious undermining of Western Civilization by a secret cabal of Jews and their agents, eventually placing their supposed "King" on Earth's throne. I'm really surprised and saddened Mulgrew didn't do more homework in regard to Sungenis's anti-Semitic and irrational bile.

Reply

KIF

4/8/2014 06:38:02 am

The Protocols were not the only anti-Semitic example
There's loads more
And it's a fact that Jews did not do manual labour because they were prohibited from doing so because of being Christ Killers.
This is an integral aspect of anti-Semitism and it's proliferation of the fact that Jews did not integrate with society

Reply

Byron DeLear

4/8/2014 11:24:20 am

Quite aware Protocols are not "the only anti-Semitic example," only that it stands as a supremely concentrated and deceptive collection of antisemitism that includes all of the main points (as presented here) of Sungenis's bigotry---the supposed secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world through the undermining of cultural institutions by creating a sort of moral race to the bottom, capped off with the a typical "Anti-Christ" canard. It appears that Sungenis reprises this track from Protocols, albeit repackaged. ---sadly, the publication is still in print around the world as serious literature.

KIF

4/8/2014 12:32:23 pm

The Jewish conspiracy myth sprung from the historical fact of the reality of anti-Semitism and that Jews had to be clever in order to exist in a world that was devastatingly against them. There is truth in the claims that Jews had to be clever in order to exist in a world that was against them. What was the reason behind Cromwell's importing of Jews into England?

Scott David Hamilton

4/8/2014 05:57:17 am

I'm not sure it's correct to say Kate Mulgrew is herself promoting geocentrism (or more correctly, the strong anthropic principle, judging from the entire trailer), just because she's narrating it. I don't see any evidence that she's anything but a hire. If narrating something means you promote the people who made the documentary, then Mulgrew also promotes NASA (she narrated the Of Ashes and Atoms), and it's a wash.

Reply

Kaoteek

4/8/2014 09:47:47 am

Don't know if you've seen this, but Mulgrew has reacted to the trailer on her facebook page.

"I understand there has been some controversy about my participation in a documentary called THE PRINCIPLE. Let me assure everyone that I completely agree with the eminent physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was himself misrepresented in the film, and who has written a succinct rebuttal in SLATE. I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism. More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused. Kate Mulgrew"

Good! I admit she didn't do her homework,
but the fact that she spoke out about this
is to her credit. Sometimes 'celebs' can be
lied to or deceived, and an edit can be final.

Harry

4/10/2014 01:13:51 am

I applaud Kate Mulgrew for denouncing the film and Robert Sungenis. I am sure that the producers of the film did mislead her, and doing narrations for science films, is after all, a respectable part of her job..

In fact, Sungenis misappropriated footage of well-known physicists to create the impression that there is a scholarly debate over geophysics, as Lawrence Krauss makes clear (see his statement, entitled "I Have No Idea How I Ended Up in That Stupid Geocentrism Documentary," at http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/08/lawrence_krauss_on_ending_up_in_the_geocentricism_documentary_the_principle.html).

Misrepresenting scientists to promote an unscientific point of view is not new. The late biologist Stephen Jay Gould used to complain that creationists misrepresented his views to falsely create the impression that he disagreed with the theory of evolution.

Not surprisingly, Phil Plait, who writes frequently about "bad astronomy," also writes about the film at http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/08/the_principle_a_documentary_about_geocentrism.html.

Reply

Titus pullo

4/10/2014 01:01:39 pm

As a catholic I honestly have never met a fellow catholic and I have been around the evangelical wing on many occasions who believe the sun goes around he earth. As for this crap about Jews and banking, the venetians were the first investment bankers, they lost the predominance because of usury laws which Jews didn't have to follow. Being opportunist isn't a crime and today many bankers are not Jews, a
Though as in any industry certain groups are over represented based on historical and cultural reasons, in a free society this should not matter but the diversity police seem to have a problem with certain types of folks not being proportionally represented, liberal authoritarianism. The neocon label is ironic though. Neoconservatism is actually from Trotskys followers who were mostly Jewish.

Reply

Leave a Reply.

Author

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.